With drought conditions persisting in parts of Canada,
much attention is focused on water. Are we water wise
or are we water wasters? Sadly, Canada's overall performance
leaves much to be desired when we compare our national performance
against peer countres in the OECD. Canadian premiers have talked much about
a new "Canadian Energy Strategy"—perhaps the time has come to
also talk abou a new "Canadian Water Strategy".

The World Bank maintains a data set that tracks
water withdrawals by country and year (ER.H2O.FWTL.K3). How does Canada stack up against
other countries? The latest data reported are for 2013.
Annual freshwater withdrawals include agricultural, industrial,
and residential use. It includes water obtained from desalination plants.
In the table below I have converted the raw data series into
per-capita use per day. The average Canadian consumes nearly 3,300
litres per day directly and indirectly. That is almost exactly
three times more than the average German consumes.

Freshwater Withdrawals (Litres per Day per Person)010002000300040005000United States4141Estonia3733Canada3288New Zealand2931Australia2675Greece2353Portugal2217Italy2065Japan1937Spain1908Mexico1798Netherlands1730Hungary1546Belgium1523Korea1390France1314Slovenia1253Austria1182Germany1097Finland823Sweden747Israel664Ireland471Slovak Rep.348Luxembourg304

The Conference Board of Canada has flagged Canada's poor
water performance as well. A January 2013 report card
gives Canada a "C". Only one other major OECD country consumes more:
the United States. Not far behind Canada are New Zealand and
Australia. Most European Union countries use much less water per capita,
and Northern European countries tend to be more frugal than Southern
European countries.

‘Good stewardship
of our water resources requires the use of appropriate
pricing mechanisms.’

Why is Canada's water use so high? To begin with, it is
important to distinguish between gross and net water use.
Gross water use can be dissaggregated into water consumed (net use)
and water returned. Residential water use is actually
dropping on a per-capita basis. Agriculture is by far the largest user
of water in Canada, as only a sixth of water used for agricultural
purposes returns to rivers and lakes. Irrigation does not only
grow crops but also leads to large amounts of evaporation.
Industrial use is dominated by withdrawals for thermo-electric
power generation plants. Most of it is used for cooling, and while
some water evaporates, most cooling water is returned to lakes and rivers.
Even though the gross use of water by industry is much larger than for
agriculture, the net use by agriculture is utlimately larger.

Even after allowing for Canada's large use of water for
cooling purposes, that leaves a tremendously high level
of water use for agriculture. While Canada has enormous
water resources, this can mask local and seasonal scarcity.
As the drought conditions in Western Canada have demonstrated,
this scarcity can become problematic. We need to balance
residential, agricultural, and industrial use of water, and
this requries comprehensive as well as
fair and equitable volumetric pricing of water.
Canada is still far away from this goal. We need to learn
to become more frugal users of our water. Good stewardship
of our water resources requires the use of appropriate
pricing mechanisms.